State telecom operator has invested over Rs. 57 bln in past 7 years
View(s):Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), the flagship national ICT solutions provider and the national backbone network (NBN) operator, said this week that Sri Lanka is heading towards achieving the country’s ICT objectives, to accelerate economic development.The company said in a statement that the overall investment the group has made throughout its entire 150 year span is enormous in terms of magnitude. Since 2007, SLT has invested in excess of Rs. 57 billion (US$485 million) to improve the country’s telecommunication infrastructure.
Lalith de Silva, Group CEO of SLT, expressing his views on these industry developments, said, “In line with the Government roadmap, we have invested heavily in establishing the NBN aimed at encouraging all operators to benefit through economies of scale. We believe in sharing communication and ICT infrastructure towards achieving the development goals of the country. From the inception, we have been sharing our infrastructure such as global connectivity, national backbone, towers, data centre, cloud services, coverage and building spaces as well as our ICT infrastructure under the wholesale business unit for other operators and service providers, ISPs, etc. whilst ensuring that the highest standards are met in terms of quality and reliability”.
SLT says it has already taken proactive steps to invest in a futuristic global connectivity option exceeding 24 Tera bits per second (24Tbps) bandwidth capability via the new cable system SEA ME WE 5, upgrading of the existing SEA ME WE 4 cable system with 100G technologies and expanding the terrestrial backbone network (National Fibre Optic Backbone Network) to bring gigantic capacity to users in Sri Lanka accessible for future focused data demands.
The statement said SLT has embarked on massive network modernisation and expansion projects. NBN supports sustainable national progress connecting all 329 Divisional Secretariats to strengthen connected government activities. 100% fibre optic coverage of electorates was achieved well within the NBN target date requirement and fibre optic network exceeds the NBN requirement of at least one point of interconnection per electorate. NBN facilitates high speed and uninterrupted backbone connectivity with highest redundancy across the country for all operators.